One of the Grand Societal Challenges of the 21st century is to ensure food and nutrient security for a growing population under climate change and pressure on natural resources.
Sustainable crop production needs to be secured and enhanced. Current food production methods utilise excess energy, water, pesticides and chemicals. New ways of sustainable crop production are necessary to increase productivity, reduce the amount of used chemicals and/or improve the quality of the crops. This will be crucial to maintain access to affordable safe and nutritious food for a healthy life, and to serve the increasing demand for industrially used biomass whilst keeping and improving a healthy environment, natural habitats and increasing biodiversity. Indeed all aspects of sustainability need to be covered: environmental, economic and social and cultural aspects.
Therefore, the main objective of the “ERA-NET Cofund on Sustainable Crop production“ (SusCrop) was to strengthen the European Research Area (ERA) in the field of crop research, in particular in relation to crop production. Modern crop production must be addressed by taking into account the whole food value chain, crop diversity and resilience, resource use efficiency, nutrient recycling, ecosystem services, limiting negative environmental impacts, integrated pest management, reducing and re-using waste and achieving food and nutritional security. To address the current challenges described above, the SusCrop consortium:
a) implemented a joint call for proposals in the R&D&I area of sustainable crop production. The joint call was co-funded by the partners of the consortium and the European Commission (EC), and
b) implemented additional joint activities (funding and non-funding activities) that further contributed to:
• the harmonisation of data collection on sustainable cropping to deliver possibilities to build models and indices of sustainability and resilience, and
• the development of methods for assessing the sustainability and resilience of cropping systems at different levels (e.g. field, farm, landscape).
The Cofunded Call and the additional activities of SusCrop encouraged the interaction between different stakeholder including academia, the private sector, farmers and society to enhance impact, facilitate knowledge exchange and uptake of results to deliver measurable benefits to Sustainable Crop Production in Europe.
In addition, SusCrop provided strategic research directions for a sustainable crop production for the future in close collaboration with the Joint Programming Initiative on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change (FACCE-JPI).
